I rarely disagree with the menswear guy, but... there is such a thing as too many pockets.

My kingdom for *one* essay that helps undergrads understand the epistemological difference between free-form information and putting things in a table. (Not a history of double-entry bookkeeping! Not an investigation of clay tablets! Not a history of Visi-Calc! Those are fine but not those!)

Get your abstracts in today!

Ghostwriters frame material and framing matters. Even in science. A great write up on Nick Hopwood’s research into the history of Edwards and Steptoe’s book A Matter of Life. #histmed #histsci

Excited to see that the Thomas Fisher Library has a copy of the book that contains this ad that retains the original "wallet binding with a secret pocket, designed for carrying address cards and a supply of 'shields for Cyprian War' (i.e. condoms)" — thanks for the tip, @victorianlondon.bsky.social

the quaint world of Victorian porn advertisements

I think it’s really culturally and politically important to try to imagine the subjectivity of the Other, but sorry: just can’t imagine being cool as Link Wray

I'm not sure where I'm going here, but there seems to be a fair amount of overlap between what (some) people want from AI agents and what (some) people wanted to achieve by keeping commonplace books — organizing and synthesizing a personal archive of information, ideas, etc

@sarahebull.bsky.social Here is my favourite resource; it was my go-to for early modern handwriting long before I arrived in Cambridge: www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/

Wordsworth: welcome to the meeting of Romantic Poets. We need to set our agenda, and I am recommending clouds, flowers, or possibly clouds shaped like flowers Percy Shelley: or the severed head of a tyrant William Blake: or thicc Satan Wordsworth: or what??? Blake: I have produced a sketch-

Now available electronically, if your library subscribes to Cambridge Core: Melissa Ganz, ed., British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...

The @uofglasgow.bsky.social is currently running a free online course (3 weeks, 3 hours/week) on Early Modern Scottish Palaeography www.futurelearn.com/courses/ems-...

Hey, friends, do any of you know of a good reading (or instruction manual?) on reading pre-1900 (let's say 1700-1923) handwritten texts? Some of the students in my History of Reading class want to focus their final projects on older "traces of reading" and would love more specific instruction +

Only 3 more days to submit to the roundtable on Olga Tokarczuk's 18th Century that @kasiaiskasia.bsky.social and I are organizing for the 2026 ASECS. Your abstracts have to go through the ASECS portal, but please reach out to us individually if you're thinking of submitting & have any questions.

Fairies on Fridays! "A crowned fairy king seated on a hedgehog drawn by a girl holding a giant daisy, accompanied by dancing fairies." --- Charles Altamont Doyle. Wellcome Collection.

Sometimes at the end of a long day you need to carve out some time to hang out with tiny books

& with those pages, the Le Guin books are *printed*!!! A few days drying & then a big binding & packing & shipping party @skeuomorphpress.org

Our next #RSVPDigiEv is about a month away! Join us Oct. 17 to hear about recent updates to the Curran Index from editors @emilyjlm.bsky.social+Lars Atkin in a talk, "From Periodicals to Dailies: Attribution Scholarship and the Joys and Challenges of Archival Plenitude." rs4vp.org/oct-digital-...

Who. Did. This!?!

Nilkantha's paper at RSVP-Chicago was terrific & I'm excited to read this essay.

We are thrilled to announce the shortlist for the 2025 Stansky Book Prize for best book in British Studies dealing with the period since 1800. www.nacbs.org/news/stansky... @uchicagopress.bsky.social @oxunipress.bsky.social @stanfordpress.bsky.social @princetonupress.bsky.social

What amazing company to keep! And what a thrill to see Reading Practice honored in this way by the NACBS! @uchicagopress.bsky.social

We are launching a new #CFP at the Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine on Climate Change and Planetary Health. More details here link.springer.com/collections/...

Join the Print Club! And also marvel at how hard it is to cut out a square in binder’s board.

I’m cooking today. #typehighday

Trying out some new old type very quickly while prepping a typesetting lesson for my students. I need more time for this. I need to make more time for this.

I have deleted my account using this workaround.

Really hard to go back to editing after yesterday…

‘Advertisement’ remains a struggle for me despite having written quite a bit about advertising!

#periodicals folks, have you seen this before?

Wait, why is this 1890 newspaper printed in two different fonts???

I don’t like giving money to Bezos or advocating for buying books from Amazon, but they are selling my book for $3.83 today—in hardback (as opposed to $35). The paperback will be out in January, so I guess they are fire 🔥 selling their stock. In case you are interested www.amazon.com/Strike-Labor...

How I spent my night....

REMINDER: Deadline to apply to be the next SHARP News Bibliographer(s) coming up soon! Apply by October 01 2025. See the link for details: sharpweb.org/sharpnews/20... #BookHistory #Bibliography #Bibliographer #Research #Zotero #Publishing #Books

I do wonder what would happen if we made the workload lie a reality. 50 mins total prep for a lecture then pens down. Max 10mins per essay, use crap irrelevant genAI prompts. Actually let students experience the reality that management design.

A class analysis remains crucial: ultimately the university/college leadership class only feels accountable to, and thus only actually speaks to, the donor and political class. This op-ed only speaks to faculty as a reminder of an order in which we have no place except to be disciplined. (6/4)

The President of Barnard College calls for more controversial speakers like the late Kirk (without citing any of his controversial views), a position at odds with what Barnard colleagues describe as a track record of censoring events and speakers on Palestine. (1/4) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/o...

Reminder that if Air Canada cancel your flight out of the UK and say they can't rebook it same day, you can ring them and say: "You are obliged to check sister carriers." Then they will magically remember to do so. This post brought to you by me now flying BA to Toronto, 5hrs later than planned.

I’m delighted to be part of this term’s London 19th Century Studies Seminar line up, and on a periodicals panel with @andrewkingc19.bsky.social no less! Join us at Senate House on Tues 14 Oct - all welcome!

Magic finger #manicule

I can't remember the details, and can't find them now, for my favorite Robert Redford anecdote, but: When Indecent Proposal was being discussed, someone asked a film critic if she would sleep with Robert Redford for $1 million, and she replied, "Yes, but where would I get the money?"

Ontario friends, I’ve got a couple of book-related events coming up the week after next! I’ll be at York on Monday the 29th, and at Guelph on Friday the 3rd. DM me if you’d like more info—it would be great to see you!

While looking towards the US, and I hope that I might be wrong, people and friends of the blue skies, and I truly like it here, but maybe transitioning from one platform to yet another might be in the air soon? Keep your #Mastodon accounts running ...

Poetry/lit people, send Daniel your books

Modeling Culture explores AI not only as a technology to critique, but as a new mode of inquiry for research and interpretation. Three interconnected components will unfold in 2025-26: a faculty and grad seminar, a public lecture series, and an open-access curriculum. Public talk details in thread👇

Wittgenstein: It is impossible to use words without making meaning. Vogue:

Some good news during these trying times: I'll be heading to Lexington in Dec to start a tenure track library faculty position at the University of Kentucky as their new (and first full-time) Head of King Library Press, one of the oldest bibliographic teaching presses at a US college or uni. 1/2

Artifact from a different era: a heavy (but single-volume) tome attempting to catalog all published papers about neural networks, as of 1990.

So the strategy to not kill the US weapons industry is threats. What a surprise.